About Amala

Amala is a development firm for experiential, hospitality-anchored places. We plan and build small walkable districts where a hotel is the anchor and the rest of the program sits inside one walk: homes in a mix of sizes, shops and restaurants at street level, a green or a shoreline to use them on, and somewhere to learn. We take a project from first concept through site selection and entitlement, and we operate what we build.

The firm grew out of running hospitality rather than only drawing it. Casa Monteflores in San Juan and Macchiato in Toronto operate today, and a cluster of lakeside A-frame cabins is in planning. They are small on purpose. Running them is how we learned what a room actually costs to turn over, which amenities earn their square footage, and how quickly a badly placed back-of-house decision becomes permanent — the operating detail that later separates a district that pencils from one that only renders well.

Behind the underwriting is institutional practice. Founder Bryce Galen underwrote and modeled JV-equity, preferred-equity and participating-debt investments across a $1 billion value-add fund in hotel, mixed-use, office, apartment and condominium development in the real estate group at Fidelity Investments. Since then he has done entitlement work in front of local boards, including a rezoning effort run with organized neighbors in the Nashville metro. We plan for the hearing from the first sketch, and we would rather put a community benefit in writing than in a rendering.